The heat is on. Bureau of Meteorology ‘altering climate figures’ — The Australian

Congratulations to The Australian again for taking the hard road and reporting controversial, hot, documented problems, that few in the Australian media dare to investigate.

How accurate are our national climate datasets when some adjustments turn entire long stable records from cooling trends to warming ones (or visa versa)? Do the headlines of “hottest ever record” (reported to a tenth of a degree) mean much if thermometer data sometimes needs to be dramatically changed 60 years after being recorded?

One of the most extreme examples is a thermometer station in Amberley, Queensland where a cooling trend in minima of 1C per century has been homogenized and become a warming trend of 2.5C per century. This is a station at an airforce base that has no recorded move since 1941, nor had a change in instrumentation. It is a well-maintained site near a perimeter fence, yet the homogenisation process produces a remarkable transformation of the original records, and rather begs the question of how accurately we know Australian trends at all when the thermometers are seemingly so bad at recording the real temperature of an area. Ken Stewart was the first to notice this anomaly and many others when he compared the raw data to the new, adjusted ACORN data set. Jennifer Marohasy picked it up, and investigated it and 30 or so other stations. In Rutherglen in Victoria, a cooling trend of -0.35C became a warming trend of +1.73C. She raised her concerns (repeatedly) with Minister Greg Hunt.

Now the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been forced to try to explain the large adjustments. Australians may finally gain a better understanding of what “record” temperatures mean, and the certainty ascribed to national trends. There is both a feature and a news piece today in The Weekend Australian.

The odd case of Amberley minima. If you live nearby the local thermometer would say that mornings now are slightly cooler for you than they were in 1941. The BOM says otherwise.

After a description of some of the problems, the BOM responds to explain the adjustments. Most of it the usual argument from authority, and handwaving about how they are experts and a very complicated technique (that produces odd results) is “likely” right:

“‘BOM has rejected Dr Marohasy’s claims and said the agency had used world’s best practice and a peer reviewed process to modify the physical temperature records that had been recorded at weather stations across the country.

There’s a suggestion that the changes don’t matter much:

‘It said data from a selection of weather stations underwent a process known as “homogenisation” to correct for anomalies. It was “very unlikely” that data homogenisation impacted on the empirical outlooks.

‘”In a statement to The Weekend Australian BOM said the bulk of the scientific literature did not support the view that data homogenisation resulted in “diminished physical veracity in any particular climate data set’’.

‘Historical data was homogenised to account for a wide range of non-climate related influences such as the type of instrument used, choice of calibration or enclosure and where it was located.

“All of these elements are subject to change over a period of 100 years, and such non-climate ­related changes need to be ­accounted for in the data for ­reliable analysis and monitoring of trends,’’ BOM said.

‘Account is also taken of temperature recordings from nearby stations. It took “a great deal of care with the climate record, and understands the importance of scientific integrity”.

Translated: We are careful people, “trust us”

Despite Amberley being a good station (as far as anyone can figure) it was adjusted to fit “neighbours” hundreds of kilometers away:

‘BOM said the adjustment to the minimums at Amberley was identified through “neighbour comparisons”. It said the level of confidence was very high because of the large number of stations in the region. There were examples where homogenisation had resulted in a weaker warming trend.

Amberley is near Brisbane which also shows a cooling raw trend, though other neighbours like Cape Moreton Lighthouse, Bundaberg, Gayndah, Miles, and Yamba Pilot Station have an average warming trend. (See Ken’s Kingdom) NASA’s Goddard Institute also adjusts the minima at Amberley up by homogenization with other stations. But the radius of those stations is nearly 1,000 km. These other sites may themselves have had real warming, or an urban heat island effect, or other equipment changes or relocations. It’s a messy business.

The BOM rarely portrays how complicated and messy it is, nor how much the final trends are affected by their complicated adjustment processes.

Heat is on over weather bureau ’homogenising’ temperature records

In the case of Rutherglen its neighbours don’t show a warming trend, yet it was adjusted up:

‘In the case of Rutherglen, she says, the changes do not even appear consistent with a principle in the bureau’s own technical manual, which is that changes should be consistent with trends at neighbouring weather stations.

At Burke, in western NSW, BoM deleted the first 40 years of data because temperatures before 1908 were apparently not recorded in a Stevenson screen, the agreed modern method.

Marohasy says this could have been easily accounted for with an accepted algorithm, which would not have changed the fact that it was obviously much hotter in the early 20th century than for any period since. Instead, the early record is deleted, and the post-1910 data homogenised.

…

Graham Lloyd writes about how Jennifer Marohasy was trying to use the data for forecasting floods with historical data and what an artificial homogenisation process may mean:

‘Marohasy’s research has put her in dispute with BoM over a paper she published with John Abbot at Central Queensland University in the journal Atmospheric Research concerning the best data to use for rainfall forecasting. (She is a biologist and a sceptic of the thesis that human activity is bringing about global warming.) BoM challenged the findings of the Marohasy-Abbot paper, but the international journal rejected the BoM rebuttal, which had been prepared by some of the bureau’s top scientists.

This has led to an escalating dispute over the way in which ­Australia’s historical temperature records are “improved” through homogenisation, which is proving more difficult to resolve. If Marohasy is right, contrary to widely published claims, last year cannot be called the hottest year on ­record.

But in furious correspondence with BoM, Marohasy argues the computer “homogenisation” of the records is being undertaken in a way that is at odds with its original intent.

I’m not so sure about the Amberley data being improperly manipulated. There is a warming trend from 1940 to 1980 in the raw data, and then another warming trend from 1980 onwards in both the adjusted and raw data. The main feature seems to be a step change down of almost 2 degrees C in 1980, in the raw data.

If there was a sensor or stevenson screen change in 1980, or a site relocation, then the correction may be valid. If there was no such change then the BOM would definately have a case to answer. It would be interesting to see the breakdown between max and min temps, as the stevenson screen shading impacts on max temps only.

The adjustments you mention would require extensive station metadata. It does not appear that such data is the sole basis for the “corrections” applied by BoM. And if it isn’t the sole basis, the squealing warmists at BoM need to be [snipped] into next week or beyond…

Of note here is the experience from NOAA in the US. TOB (time of observation bias) adjustments make up the bulk of their artificial warming trend applied to surface station records. They claim that extensive station metadata “is available” for making such adjustments. But are they using it? The answer is no. They are using Tom Karl’s pet rat TOBy, a computer algorithm (born in 1985 in a paper that mentions global warming) that adjusts for TOB based on assumptions. How do we know the lying scum are still using TOBy? Or one of his offspring? Simple. Newer US stations that used MMTS and reported hourly, therefore needed no TOB adjustment, have had TOB adjustment (and artificial warming) applied.

Peter, just to be absolutely clear. When you say homogenization “always” makes the past cooler, I presume you are referring to the overall national mean. (The individual homogenization process makes some stations warmer and some cooler, but the cooling adjustments are larger than the warming ones). Ken’s work shows that when all the adjustments are added together they are not neutral. There is a real change in the trend.

Jo, on reflection I suspect the word ‘always’ may not be correct in this context. Doubtless, there are a few stations where ‘homogenisation’ has not cooled down the past.

However, I would suggest the ‘logic’ which produced these few, was also the same logic which guaranteed the maximum amount of unjustifiable historic cooling for the largest number of stations possible.

After all, in what world would you want to adjust an historically accurate site, with no UHI or other considerations, by using a dodgy weighting formula based on the results of other stations located hundreds of kilometres away?

It would be good if this could be debated and resolved,but as we know, this is a politicised position taken by BoM and they will obscure and use their authority to deny any dissection of their work.I really hope this issue does not go away.

I missed an important point in the temperature chart for Amberley, I wonder how common this is:

The two temperature sets suddenly get into sync in 1979/80, which is amazingly coincident with the start of the satellite era. Post 1980, the differences between the two temperature sets are minuscule.

There is an excellent section on GISS homogenisation in the Climate4you website. It is impossible to see how these changes in temperature records can be justified, unless of course there is an ulterior motive.

BoM using world’s best practice ? Not only GISS, NASA and NCDC but now BoM are caught with their filthy fingers in the cookie jar. They’re all using that same “world’s best practice” algorithm devised to deliberately alter the historical record. Remember the email about making the “blip” disappear? Now they’re doing it on a world scale using their secret methodology called “world’s best practice”.

This is so sad. 1) It is sad that radical left-wing scientists change historical data to match, or strengthen, their knowingly false global warming trends. 2) Second, weather and climate data are collected with taxpayer funds and shoddy scientists and their lackeys in so called management positions have no right to corrupt historical data for their personal gain. 3)Third, for a free people to retain their freedom, their government must be staffed with virtuous people who took an oath of office to serve the public, not to cheat them and lie to them. This is a very dangerous threat to your freedom. 4)Fourth, science has played a key role in the advancement of the public good and the development of free peoples everywhere free nations developed, and it is malfeasance in office to violate that public trust in science and lead them to be skeptical and disdainful of their leaders and of science and the search for knowledge and truth. And 5) Once this distrust of one science starts it will snowball to all sciences much to the misfortune of honest scientists and the public they have served so well.
Is there a better example of reversal of progress and a significant step back to darker times?

Perhaps it’s more serious than fraud (in the definition provided). White collar crime is fraud at another level.
Definition of ‘White-Collar Crime: “A non-violent crime that is committed by someone, typically for financial gain“.

Or an Australian context to Computer related crime: “The use of a computer is integral to committing the offence”. Examples are offences such as computer-related forgery (where false data are put forward as authentic) and computer related fraud (the fraudulent interference with or manipulation of data to cause property loss)”. Everyone else is paying for it (your taxes at work), so it’s property loss.

If the persons involved were motivated by an intent (politically motivated or not) to receive public money (grants or salary) and used it defraud (alter) public-owned property (data), is that in the realm of a criminal act under the above definition? Perhaps if a few “researchers” and other beneficiaries were required front up to a serious investigation, it would be a loud wake-up call and perhaps stop the rot. Is that a little strong?

I mentioned the potential for a class action, if the authorities are unwilling to address this aspect criminally, and I believe this is a very real possibility in the future.

They are skating on thin ice! They should be aiming to express doubts in the potential for catastrophic warming now, and admit the failure of their theory, or risk serious financial and/or criminal repercussions.

“So CAGW would presumably mean Criminally Adjusted Global Warming?
Perhaps a little strong?”
Peter, with the billions of dollars being siphoned off and into the pockets of these fraudsters around the world, I’d reckon criminally sums it up about right.
Nice one Tim.
I could see you and I would go down a treat on Q&A.

Well Big Climate obviously preferred Covertly Adjusted Global Warming but you know how these things always pan out in a Wickedleaks internet age folks? Amazingly there’s always a fresh gang of maroons coming along who don’t get it.

Perhaps not strong enough! If the natural climate change that could have been seen from unadjusted data is about to bring about an unexpected future then the religious zealots who have tried to alter history to suit a bad theory could have worsened our ability to cope.
Even if future incorrectly predicted change is not severely cold, the preparation and falsely attributed blame for warming that so far did not eventuate has already cost us all dearly.
Thus it could be CATASTROPHIC AJUSTED GLOBAL WARMING. The castastrophy being that the world is incorrectly preparing, blaming, redtaping and wasting billions on a futile parasite infested fantasy. Thanks to the hard work of Jennifer Marohasy and Ken Stewart the catastrophy may be noticed.
After it is noticed then the massive effort required to untangle the mess is itself a catastrophy.

In view of the political interpretation of BOM data and reports, the public at large should be able to rely on their initial accuracy. However, when this is questioned, and anomalies such as Amberley and Rutherglen are pointed out, the public should expect an honest reply to queries. We know that have been changes to sites, equipment and methodology over the years, but as we are only talking about fractions of a degree in some cases, it is likely that the standard error of these measurements exceeds these values anyhow. Years ago I did some work using a lot of alcohol maximum-minimum thermometers inside and outside forested areas over night and I remember, despite calibration, the results showed a lot of variability and a standard error of half a degree Celsius was as good as it got.

With the advent of satellites and temperature sensing devices there has been improvement in the accuracy of global records, and these measurements do not show much in the way of an anomaly if any. These data are free of site limitations and include all the globe, not just the large number of stations in Europe and North America from where the AGW hypothesis has come from.

However, watching Q & A last week I was somewhat amazed as to the extent of the conviction of panel (Jones, Ridout, Wong, Truss,Palmer et al.) who are unlikely to hold a science degree amongst them, that we still have to fight carbon for the sake of future generations. And at the same time we export an enormous amount of coal to India and China! If that is not hypocrisy, particularly from Mr. C. Palmer, what is?

Taking up your point re accuracy of global temps, the other factor is the automatic weather station thermometers reaction time to changes in temp.
This is alluded to herehttp://cawcr.gov.au/publications/technicalreports/CTR_049.pdf on Page 7.
Quote
‘There is some indication of a small (less than 0.2°C) increase in diurnal temperature range, most likely because of the faster response time of automatic probes relative to mercury-in-glass thermometers.’
Anyone that actually follows the data flow will see that there can be sharp rises and falls within a minute with AWS technology. The old thermometers could not have reacted so quickly to sudden surges in temps.
So, would AWS recordings need to be reduced for maximum temps – or older temps increased a fraction to account for this anomaly? This would also affect minimum temps.
A case in question was Sydney’s record temp in Jan 2013 of 45.8C recorded at 2:53pm.
At 2:49pm the temp was 44.9C and at 2:59pm it was 44.8C – an increase of 0.9C and then fall of 1.1C in 10 mins!
I’m sure the old record of 45.3 in 1939 could have done with an AWS therm.

As I mentioned I was looking at night minima temperatures in forested areas around Waratah (The Mt. Bischoff tine mine site) in western central Tasmania in the late 1960′s. It is a very cold area at 2000ft. elevation with frequent winter snow, and shares along with Miena (3300ft.) some of the lowest temperature records in the state; these occurred on windless, cloudless nights and, from memory, the open grass areas were 3 or 4 degrees colder than the adjoining forest.

My point is that a little protective tree cover modifies the local micro-climate very significantly, and if this is the case, which is probable, wouldn’t our temperature records be exaggerated somewhat because they are taken in open sites and yet there is a lot of the country with some tree cover? One only has took at where cattle spend their nights, not in the open paddock, but under the trees if they are lucky to have some, and farmer friends used to reckon that their patch of bush was worth a lot of money as it gave better protection for birthing cattle and sheep with less loss.

In the Sahara desert life in the oases is quite tolerable due to the micro climate.

The BMO in Australia is lagging far behind the Met Office here in Britain.

They have been telling blatant lies for ******* years and getting away with it. Under the leadership of Julia Slingo the UKMO have instigated poetry readings as a means of getting the message out to the unqualified.

Frome the CAGW cookbook – leg of lamb.
pre heat the oven to 200c
drive around the neighbourhood and take the temperatures of their ovens. If they are not cooking a leg of lamb, no worries, just make a number up. add all the numbers up, take the average and reset your oven.

Thanks so much for all your hard work over the years on this, and I think we should also remember the work of Warwick Hughes. I think he was one of the very first Australians to really ask the hard questions about the integrity of the temperature series, and in particular why all the data before 1910 was discarded when much of it had been recorded in a Stevenson screen.

Everyone else,

I know Jo has recently asked that donations be made to Case Smit to help bring Patrick Moore to Australia. Case is asking for $100,000 for the tour. I don’t know how much of this large sum will be for Mr Moore by way of speaking fee.

I personally think that it is outrageous to ask for this amount of money for someone who has not much helped our cause over the years, when $100,000 could keep Jo going for a couple of years.

I say, if you value this blog, and like the two pieces that Graham Lloyd wrote in today’s The Australia, make a significant donation to this blog… to Jo’s work.

I’m currently funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation. But Jo could do with some help.

Congratulation to the Australian and Grahame Lloyd for a courageous article that challenges so forcefully the orthodox view of so many Government agencies that insist on supporting the now very flawed view of “global warming”. No matter what the BoM might claim, they have altered the figures and, wonder of wonder, they now show a marked “warming trend” where none existed, or existed to a lesser extent, before. Congratulation, too, to Jennifer Maharosey and her co-workers for persevering with the investigation to discover and calibrate the extent of this fraud. Who can we trust for the truth. Not the BoM, that’s for sure.

Absolutely agree, but I think we should instead crowd fund a TV science show instead, one aimed at under 15′s.

Jennifer, on your CQU scholarship, neural networks are probably not going solve this IMO, but some of the work I did at uni on genetic algorithms just might, and the application of genetic algorithms to climate is just as novel. A genetic approach to Dr Evans model might be illuminating too, perhaps you might consider broadening your scope a bit.

I’ve verified that solar & climate “adjustments” are being done with an agenda. However, I’m not naive enough to be persuaded that it’s a good use of my time arguing with agenda-driven intransigents. They’re going to keep doing it wrong and making excuses no matter what we do. They have interests to protect and they’ll do what’s necessary to protect those interests. That’s natural — just like climate.

If one follows the StevenGoddard site, you can see what the “adjustments” have done to the US temperature record.

SG had a fun little graph a couple of weeks ago that showed that the “adjustments” to the US data had an R2 correlation of 0.99 with CO2 rise.. How is that even possible !! Its NOT, unless it was planned.

As BOM says.. they use the same methodology…… enough said. !!

——–

If you look ‘in general’ at the data adjustments to the Australian temperatures, you will see that there appears to be an “aim” to make all stations have a positive trend somewhere around the same .

Those stations that might have already have had a positive trend, therefore get less “adjustment”.

Places like Wangaratta, Bendigo, Amberley etc etc etc that show a cooling trend in the raw data get the most adjustment.

The whole aim seems to be to CREATE an overall warming trend, just like the US.

Beware fake correlations.
Pretty much every physical quantity varies nearly linearly over a “short” period of time.
Hence, a plot of any one physical quantity versus any other will appear to show a nearly perfect correlation over a short period of time.

BOM has rejected Dr Marohasy’s claims and said the agency had used world’s best practice and a peer reviewed process to modify the physical temperature records that had been recorded at weather stations across the country.

Here in the States we have NASA and NOAA performing these same “best practices” with the exact same results: the past is getting cooler and the present is getting warmer. Tony Heller’s Real Science site, https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/ has done a Herculean effort in identifying this apparently widespread “standardized” out-and-out falsification of historical data.

In the non-governmental world of science and engineering the accepted “best practice” for reading a sensor is to, I know it’s a real stretch but, hang on to your hat, it’s complicated, you…read the sensor and write down what it says. If you, for some reason, don’t notice a whole bunch of bad sensors for, I don’t know, 4 or 5 decades you would no longer be employed as a scientist, engineer or technician. If this was a circus act where the trainer has a chimp or parrot read a thermometer in an act and the animal got it wrong for 30 or 40 years… it wouldn’t have been in the show to begin with.

As Leonard’s pointed out above, it is a terribly sad commentary on the state of “science” and our various government’s utter contempt for their People that is a huge part of the damage here.

Thanks Jennifer i have emailed Senator Birmingham i have linked his email contact to his name. I appreciate the comments of scaper below, but it only takes a couple of minutes so its probably worth sending an email.

Peter, best of luck if you are going to write to Birmingham. It goes like this…your letter/email will be received, you will either get a standard response or your enquiry will be delegated to a secretary that will give you a long winded nothing!

For maximum effect, CC the opposition shadow. I did this when I took on Combet’s office over the false highest emitters per capita on the planet and won because they dropped that line in the media within a week. Make sure your letter is polite and certainly non-combative.

I’ve known Greg Hunt for about five years, have a private line to him and usually get a personal response within an hour. I was in contact with Greg yesterday in relation to Palmer and 18c.

I believe that exposing this fraud is a noble cause, but sadly don’t see anything worthwhile coming out of it. Not discouragement, so go for it and throw in “it is my will” in your letter.

I remember working for the Australian Archives in Darwin 1975 and the local BOM Director handed over a leather-bound journal containing temperature records dating from Goyder’s expedition to survey the settlement about 1869.There were decades of data in this book ,when records of this type are in archival custody they should be safe. The Archives are I think known as the National Archives and you should be able to search online to find out where the stuff is held.

Its significant that the mainstream media has “reported the fraud”. Now get your letter of support for Graham Lloyd into The Australian newspaper because this brave journalist is potentially in for a hell of beating from his peers and the rest of the global warming industry.

You are right, it significant that the Australian has chosen to publish this work. Well done!!

Those of us who follow this stuff have been aware of the chicanery that goes on with temperature manipulation. Your tenacity has paid off.

You may be amused that when someone showed (forgot who, maybe Joanne) the Darwin temperatures were being cooked I wrote to Jones at the BOM suggesting maybe his name was a burden. I suggested he change it to Michael E. Mann!!

‘claims the adjusted records resemble IS “propaganda” rather than science.’ sorry I’m not being rude here to Jennifer et al that are doing such fantastic work but being polite in the face of such devious crimes sometimes don’t cut it with the public.
Last night on 9 news Melbourne we get a weather report that claims Melbourne had an above average temperature winter of 15°vs 14.2° this is complete and utter bulls^&t as Victoria has experienced a very cold winter and still is.
While the MSM can make as many erroneous claims it likes and most people now would be sceptical of them, these claims are still recorded as fact for future reference and so an error cascade occurs giving the public of the future a corrupted (false warming) history in a ‘Ministry of Truth’ fashion.
Free to air TV in Australia can keep trotting out any of it’s inane intellect destroying crap ‘reality Tv’ it wants, I’ll never watch it but if these corporations want to wilfully engage in subliminal political propaganda then the seriousness of such acts alter dramatically from simply insulting intellect to abusing constitutional freedoms.

I understand the idea of early downward adjustments, my point was is when you can get away with making up ‘truths’ whenever you like the actual reality of what’s occurring becomes moot along with any other corrupted past records which could easily be explained away by using ACORN-2 or 3 etc..

It’s no stretch of the imagination to think that countries have re-written their history to aid in administering an agenda exactly like the pseudo environmental threat of CAGW.

It is a classic case of change the data to suit the result you are chasing.

There is nothing scientific about changing raw data because it does not fit in with your assumptions. As an Engineer, I know that raw data from any source is rarely wrong and rather than change the data, these climatologists must explain it and allow for it. Changing data is not science.

Yes Paul, what should be provided is a raw set of data and a set of adjustments – deltas to compensate for various factors, but not combined, there should be a set of adjustments for TObs, a different set for site changes, another set for homogenisation so world plus dog can see what they are doing and hence where the trends are being altered.

Jennifer, what needs to be done here from an academic perspective is to get up an Australian or world standard for presentation of adjusted meteorological data that puts to bed the secret sauce of AGW ( adjustment governed warming ). The fact that ACORN can’t be replicated (audited) is a travesty.

There is so much money and so many ‘green jobs’ involved in the global warming scam that even if a hundred new glaciers turned up on our doorsteps over the next 5 years, the various government met agencies round the Western world would still be crying ‘warming’ and demanding our money to support the cosy little get rich green schemes. Even now they say that cooling is caused by warming.

Weather bureaux sold their souls years ago to provide erroneous ‘forecasts’ to help fund green researchers and it won’t stop because the world gets cooler. The only hope lies in the common sense of the public who can still look out their windows and see the snow and frost and say ‘well it’s not getting warmer here.’

The influence of ENSO on Frost Risk in eastern and south-eastern Australia
Data from 1900-2005 was analysed for the following stations:
Emerald and Goondiwindi (Qld); Gunnedah, Wagga Wagga and Deniliquin (NSW); Mildura and Nhill (Vic); and Snowtown (SA).

If we look at the first series of graphs you can see that quite often there are more frost days in El Nino years compared to La Nina years.
However, when you look at the graphs showing the date of the latest frosts each year, there is less of a distinction between El Nino and La Nina years. These graphs also show the wide range in the latest date of a frost from year to year.http://dirp3.pids.gov.ph/ACIAR/publications/dp/Appendix%20E_3.1.pdf
~ ~ ~
Northern Hemisphere:

–October 13, 1994–
“We had another week of grace before the definitive white killer arrived, silently, on October 11.
I’ve recorded first and last frost dates on this farm for 22 years.
The last frost in spring retreated backward by a good two weeks. I had an extra month of frost-free growing! That’s enough to make any gardener believe in global warming.http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/late-frost-a-leading-indicator-of-climate-change/

Aug 14, 2014
The first frost of…summer?
Thursday started frosty across parts of Wisconsin.
In today’s blog we look at unseasonably cold temperatures and then discuss when rain returns to the forecast.

A corrective process for older records may seem reasonable in many ways, because modern equipment is better than that old mercury thermometer that could be estimated to a half degree at best versus the electronic accuracy of perhaps .01 degree. Having said that, it shouldn’t ever change an actual physical reading, then, more than a half a degree. All other manipulations are just that manipulations. Personally, I would trust a reading taken 100 years ago as likely to be accurate before I would one taken now because 100 years ago, there was no agenda” to be supported.

Tom, I’d trust mercury thermometers over today’s “electronic accuracy”. We know how mercury reacts to any given weather situation … “electronic accuracy” seems to be too susceptible to being manipulated as seen fit to represent the meme. I would rather call it “electronic precision”, how accurate it is is debatable.

Ever since the ACORN data set has been introduced in early 2012, we have had the hottest day, month, season, year – you name it, we’ve had it. Coincidence??
Ken Stewart and Jen have done a some great work on ACORN v raw temp data and the results speak for themselves. The homogenisation of the raw temps, using just 112 weather stations, has skewed the temp record so much that ACORN has little credibility.

Hang on, hasn’t their ABC asserted that they don’t need to do that any more on climate change… Last election was a classic case, during the election outsiders and Q&A stil ran their usual 3/4 to 1 leftist vs conservative ratio, and refused to balance up commentry during the regulated election period (after Gillard announced it).

Precisely, this argument is getting down to tenths of a degree in some cases and the adjustments made by the BOM exceed by factors, the actual real world temperature changes. I mean if we are talking about a debate where we try to pull apart 0.9c over 100 years and assign attributes to its causation, how the hell do you start making changes to the inputs of over 2.5c. Its fair to say the entire data set has been rendered farcical in relation to its ability to inform the debate.

I spent 13 years in calibration and learned enough to consider the BoM’s homogenisation as creative, agenda-driven worthlessness. I am just stunned at the liberties taken. This isn’t science. It isn’t even statistics. I am wondering if there could be a class action mounted.

22 Aug: LancasterOnline: David O’Connor: Winter 2014-15 to have more snow than normal, but less than last year … and less cold air
The factors are lining up to bring us as much as a foot of snow above normal, although it’s not expected to be close to last winter’s 60-plus inches…
The average winter brings us 26 inches of snow, and for now the meteorologist would expect 2014-15 to have anywhere from 26 to 38 or 39 inches.
(Millersville University meteorologist Eric Horst) “That’s a decent winter in terms of snow, nothing lame like the 11 of two winters ago. But I think it will be very surprising to surpass the 60 of last winter.”…
But the way things look now, the much-discussed Pacific Ocean weather phenomenon known as “El Nino” indicates Lancaster County could have a little more snow than usual.
“When you’re going from neutral into the warm phase, that tends to be a winter (here) with a Southern storm track, and with cold air, that increases the chance of now,” Horst said.
As for what temperatures to expect, the MU meteorologist noted, “Last winter was the coldest winter in 20 years, so it’s very, very unlikely we’re going to have a repeat of that.”…
Both meteorologists agree the so-called “polar vortex,” while it was responsible for some of last winter’s bitter cold, is being overused as a term and is getting blamed unfairly for the current cooler-than-normal summer.
Said Horst, “Unfortunately, people this summer are using the ‘polar vortex’ as the excuse for some of these cool spells that we’ve had, and that’s completely wrong.
“It’s meteorologically impossible for a polar vortex to drop down here in the summer. That has never happened.”…
Horst cautioned that his winter forecast is not chiseled on a stone tablet: “This is just a first look at the winter outlook. You shouldn’t be placing bets on this or anything.”http://lancasteronline.com/news/local/winter—to-have-more-snow-than-normal-but/article_4cf8cd22-2a2e-11e4-8047-0017a43b2370.html

What? A meteorology station measures the climate where it is and that climate may change because of deforestation, overshadowing, buildings, drought destruction, concrete or the entire reverse. The data should not be touched or adjusted. It is what it is and a measure of all these things as well, themselves influences on the local conditions.

The climate on one side of the street will generally be different to the other side of the street. Higher temperatures, lower rainfall, stronger winds. There is no reason at all for this homogenization except to reinforce the idea that Australia, even all the oceans and land have a single climate. Similarly a single temperature.

This homogenization seems to be part of the world wide attempt to picture climate as a global affair as if there a single temperature for a continent like Australia, across winter and summer, tropics to the antarctic, ocean to ocean, deserts to mountains, night to day. Possibly the only way to measure a world temperature is to treat it as sphere in a vacuum and measure heat input vs heat output via the only mechanism, radiation. That has been done. There is no problem or it would have been front page news.

So what is this all about? Adjusting raw data like this actually builds in an unrealistic model which pictures a single Australian climate based on mandated averages punctuated solely by extreme events. This is so far from reality that it is useless. Even to use averages is fraught with difficulty. For example if daytime was full sun and nighttime was dark and someone wanted to know if the sun was up all day, on average it is. Flooding rains in Australia are just in the interval between droughts. A drought in England is six weeks without rain. In Australia it is six years.

Internationally thousands of billions have been spent trying to prevent a warming which is not happening based on a measurement which is not realistic or meaningful on the basis of a hypothesis of man made global warming which is utterly unproven and a concept of a single global temperature which is impossible to justify. It is a huge industry.

So why doesn’t the Bureau publish the raw data average as well? Weight it by all means with the area it represents, half way to the next station.

Then at least we would have real data and a temperature which was representative of the continent. What would it mean? Nothing much but you would have a fairer measure of what was happening across the country without being weighted by the prejudgement of others. Like our newspapers, we want all the news, not a selected set based on a journalist’s opinion of the news or that of a political class.

Now a real unadjusted average would be interesting, but consider that it has likely to have already been done! Consider also that it might present a real and present danger for funding if the average went down. One of the world’s most boring sciences has never been so busy than when it was able to support an ‘angry summer’.

There is one very good thing that must eventually happen and it will be a remarkable moment in time. They have been changing the recorded temps to achieve a nice graph that goes at a very sharp accent in temps for the 20th century. Now the year will come when the actual temps will be so much lower than the graph that it will be undeniable. Because they accentuated the rise, the year or years that the actual temps drop will appear even more significant than it really is by a dramatic amount! There will be no way to deny the drop, the graph will show these extreme high temps and the outside air will be so cool or cold, even the most strident anti-Carbon activists will be blown away. It will look like a stock market crash graph. I suspect this will happen very soon.

no longer a denialist, now a nihilist! full of complete nonsense, naturally:

23 Aug: Guardian: Alexander White: We need to call out Abbott’s climate nihilism
There is no other conclusion to draw that on the issue of global warming, Abbott is a climate nihilist. He holds no conviction or moral position on this issue of international and intergenerational significance.
Only a climate nihilist could so viciously attack the measures introduced under the previous government that were designed to assist people on low incomes, prevent harm to peoples’ livelihoods and the economy, and to (in some small way) mitigate the global climate catastrophe. On this issue, it appears that he believes in nothing and therefore cannot come to a moral judgement or sense any moral obligation to act…http://www.theguardian.com/environment/southern-crossroads/2014/aug/22/tony-abbott-climate-denial-weathervane-nihilism

NOAA and GISS showed the way. As I have posted elsewhere with respect to USHCN adjustments:

This has been always my problem with the adjustments. If one assumes the adjustments are valid in the first place (of which I have my doubts), once the temperatures are adjusted, even if it takes a year or two, that should be it. Instead they adjust the temperature on a nearly monthly basis, always cooling the past and warming the present. IMO, It is policy-driven fraud designed to promulgate the global warming/climate change/climate disruption/carbon pollution, or whatever new name they come up with, parable.

22 Aug: NZ Herald: AFP: World’s climate experts forecast apocalyptic weather
Intense aerial turbulence, ice storms and scorching heatwaves, huge ocean waves – the world’s climate experts forecast apocalyptic weather over the coming decades at a conference in Montreal that ended this week.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) brought together 1,000 specialists to discuss the uncertain future of weather forecasting…
“It’s irreversible and the world’s population continues to increase, so we must adapt,” said Jennifer Vanos, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas Tech University…
For meteorologists, the challenge will be to incorporate this “additional force” into their weather modelling, explained Wang.
To do so, meteorologists will need to use supercomputers to run the increasingly complex algorithms to predict weather…
Melting ice of Greenland could result in a six-metre rise in the world’s oceans, though not likely until the next century, said Eric Brun of Meteo-France, citing a study he recently published on climate’s impact on ocean levels.
Faced with so much upheaval, Jennifer Vanos said there is an urgency to adapt – including lifestyle, urban planning – to this new reality in order to protect populations.http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11312773

22 Aug: Contra Costa Times: Josh Richman: Bay Area billionaire’s climate-change ads leave fact-checkers cold
Negative reviews from watchdogs like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and the Washington Post are dogging one of the nation’s biggest political donors, a former hedge fund manager who ditched his ties to fossil fuels and presented himself as a transparent antidote to the conservative Koch brothers’ semi-clandestine funding network.
Playing fast and loose with the facts is “unwise simply because you’re handing a bat to your opponents to use squarely over your noggin,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It sounds to me as if they need their own fact-checkers on staff.”…
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog in January, however, awarded its dreaded “four Pinocchios” rating to a NextGen ad citing Chinese investment in Canada’s tar sands and claiming the controversial Keystone XL pipeline would produce oil only for other countries. The Chinese investment is small, the Post found, and NextGen took an oil executive’s words out of context to imply that no oil carried by the pipeline will remain in the U.S.
The ad “relies on speculation, not facts, to make insinuations and assertions not justified by the reality,” the Post said…
Sabato, however, said the ads are meant more to mobilize already-sympathetic voters than to change minds. And Tom Hollihan, a University of Southern California political communications expert, agreed.
“For the people for whom the ads are the primary audience, the fact-checking might not have much consequence,” Hollihan said, adding that the fact checks have more effect in correcting the record for media and policymakers…http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_26382517/billionaires-climate-change-ads-leave-fact-checkers-cold

Congratulations to Jen for her hard work in getting this into the media. Thanks Jo for referencing my work- I’m glad to have been able to identify some of the discrepancies. I hope to have some new stuff up at kenskingdom shortly.

I’ve worked with spatial data, and know from experience that it’s very dangerous to start messing with quantified spatial data relationships.

If you add a time component, such as is present in climate data, it gets even worse, as for one thing the sampling isn’t reproducible, in that the past ‘sampling’ can’t re-submitted for analysis because it doesn’t involve actual physical samples, which is unlike many other fields. Welcome to the world of climate uncertainty.

When interrogating datasets for small scale variations, you can change or increase trends in the datasets substantially by a variety of processes, including ‘homogenisation’, but in many cases this shouldn’t be done because the variations are not only often real, but they also contain fundamental factors that are essential in analysing the nature of the data. The noise isn’t always ‘noise’, and errors don’t always average out.

But most importantly with respect to homogenisation, if you are looking for ‘dominant’ signals in spatial relationships in data, the process of homogenisation can unjustifiably increase ‘dominant’ results or trends in whatever aspect or trend you are analysing. It tends to enhance trends rather than reduce them.

This sort of thing is common in mineral resource issues for example, it is relatively easy to make errors in spatial-numerical data which gives resource results which are far too large. There are numerous industry standards and checks that are applied to deal with this, which has been built up over years of disappointed investors who have their resources somewhat unsatisfactorily reduced when actually being mined at a later date. Recent scandals have actually pointed the figure at office statisticians, (including a $250 million write off by one bank in a Victorian mine case) who don’t use enough basic checks and field based-data and observations to produce their reports, and who are not familiar with the basic nature of the field data they are analysing.

The problem is the usual one within academic circles. Most of the statisticians are not field experts, and don’t know the range of issues regarding true and valid variations in the field. They also don’t have any experience or ‘ownership’ of the field data, so it doesn’t mean much to them when they make sweeping changes across a dataset. Homogenisation is one of the worst in this regard.

One essential part of this is to make sure original data is archived, that way at least people can make assessments at a later date.

Ken Stewart’s work has been SO important. Ken also helped me this last week get data together for Graham Lloyd. He was checking my figures for Broome (not included in the articles) between painting a ceiling. Hugs to Ken.

There so many similarities with the dodgy homogenisation undertaken by NIWA in New Zealand. For example –

(i) In Australia, BOM reduced average historical temperatures prior to 1971 and increased them after 1971. In New Zealand, NIWA reduced average temperatures prior to 1972.

(ii) In both countries, the alleged inhomogeneities are random, being based on a raft of different changes at measurement sites. This non-systematic causation means, as BOM’s David Jones once famously said, “the adjustments will balance out over time and make little difference to the temperature trend”. Far from balancing out, over 90% of NIWA’s adjustments contributed to the warming trend.

(iii) In both cases, the agency claims to use “internationally accepted methods” without citing any precedents or authorities. Neither has been audited or peer reviewed outside their own ranks – except that BOM peer-reviewd NIWA’s methods and disagreed with them.

You should by now be aware that the NIWA was subject to a court case on it’s temperature series led by Bob Carter’s New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust.
The judgment (7/9/2012) included:
“The plaintiff does not succeed on any of its challenges to the three decisions of NIWA in issue. The application for judicial review is dismissed and judgment entered for the defendant.”

Over the span of 6 years, my Engineering lecturers, tutors and professors didn’t let me get away with adjusting the measurements that I’d taken during experiments. Every assumption had to be stated and quantified. Every deviation justified. It’s a good habit to develop if one is going to potentially be dealing with people’s lives.

Only a chemistry lab supervisor insisted that the data I had was more accurate than determined by a rigorous analysis of measurement error as detailed in my lab report. Not a single mark in the analysis of measurement error to suggest where he may have thought I’d gone wrong. There was nothing wrong; checked by a friend (biochemist and PhD candidate) and another, independent tutor.

My friend explained that the errors could be reduced in a controlled environment by replication; repeating the experiment “many” times under the same conditions; but a 2 hour lab session was insufficient.

Which brings me back to the false confidence that the BoM have in their measurements, analyses and homogenisation(s). Measurements of weather are nothing like replications; repetitions of the same experiment. Every set of measurements is a unique “experiment” as the conditions of measurement are not controlled.

The correct way to compensate for instrument error/drift is to compare calibrations before, during (for long-running experiments) and after the experiment. On every instrument.

As regards to climate change and the implied heat (im)balance; one must measure thermodynamic properties other than temperature extremes. Measure what is important; don’t make important that which you have measured. The enthalphy of air, its useful heat content, which is strongly determined by the water vapour present. A very humid day with a maximum temperature of just 26⁰C can have more heat in the air than a dry day with a maximum of 42⁰C. The concentration of water vapour varies substantially and potentially rapidly, even over the course of one day. As the water vapour moves within the air, it transports a significant proportion of the heat contained in the air.

BoM does not appear to have any adequate, historic datasets to allow the heat content of the atmosphere to be determined. Using extremes maximises the potential error in the result. The arithmetic mean of extremes seldom adequately describes the average state of the system; especially when looking at temperatures and thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is only approximately linear over a small range. Taking two datapoints per day at quasi-random times exacerbates the errors; especially if one is using them for a deterministic, physical model (e.g. GCM-based). Using just one temperature from e.g. noon of every day would be an improvement as the time of the sample, in a time-varying system is fixed.

It would be vastly more useful to be using 5-minute to hourly samples of temperature and humidity from BoM (etc) automatic stations operating over the past 2 decades. Even older data from weather stations where measurements were taken manually at several, fixed times throughout the day would be valuable. Alas, most of those data appear to be lost; even though each automatic station was reporting only a few kilobytes of data per day.

Thus, modeling of climate by strict application of physical laws is frustrated.

BoM’s insistence on systematic, subjective “adjustment” of measurements is corrupting the remaining datasets. That will produce synthetic artifacts producing false “signals” in empirical, statistical and neural network analyses. It may take decades to identify the synthetic.

Measurements of SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE as not impacted by apparent temperatures (those incl water vapour component, though they are measured) just as they are not impacted by wind chill (though that too is measured), both impact on perceived temperatures.

These measurements are not experimental, you have a measurement recorded using established measuring devices!

The heat content of a volume of air can easily double with the presence of a few grams of water vapour per kilogram of air.

Temperature is, by itself, irrelevant. It doesn’t tell you how much heat there is in the air. One has to know the amount of heat in the atmosphere to calculate an energy (im)balance.

Search the www for “psychrometrics” and you’ll find the tool long used by Engineers to build systems for the actual control of climate. Note the significance of water vapour.

How warm you feel at a given temperature and humidity is a better indication of the heat content than the temperature. That is because the body, in trying to reject heat, is in presence of water vapour that substantially alters the specific heat of the air. However, high humidity and high temperature blocks the body’s evaporative cooling system.

Humid air can soak up much more heat than dry air for the same change in temperature. Humid air is also, as a consequence of the water vapour, much better at transporting heat by convection as well as accepting and rejecting heat when in contact with surfaces and other gases.

See my blog post from 2011 for an extended rant on the miserable state of climate models that fails to consider the actual state of enthalpy of the system in it’s pseudo-physical analyses. As a result; they can be nothing other than wrong.

Consider that the BOM did the obvious primitive analysis, the average of the original data weighted simply by area and came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with the temperature, perhaps even showing no rise or horrors, a drop in temperature across the country? Did they publish this? Was there a press announcement, effectively debunking the AGW business?

Or perhaps they went back with plausible fudge factors to make the data look as they expected and perhaps as hoped, confirming the worldwide warming which was so popular and so necessary for funding? The question is, at what point does ‘homogenizing’ the data become fraud? At what point does lying to the Australian public become a criminal offence, especially as it has cost the Australian public billions in unnecessary expenditure.

If the BOM had reported a steady drop in temperature, what would have happened to Flannery’s $93Million for hot rocks (“the science is straightforward”), the tide energy machines, the windmills and the billions in subsidies for solar panels and runaway electricity prices from the RET and the carbon tax if the BOM had reported the original data? At what point do scientific organizations like the BOM and CSIRO and Universities become political animals fighting for scarce funds and prepared to support their scientific standards for their political masters no matter what the cost to the community? What price truth in Science?

As was just said. You are not allowed touch the original data. Homogonizing is what you do with milk products, not data. It creates something which is more palatable but not normal.

I meant debase their scientific standards. Bernd is right. You cannot change the data, but why not report it unaltered as well? Changing magnitude is one thing, but how can going down become going up? The temperatures have dropped, but after scientific considerations by experts, they actually went up? That is absurd. YOu do not have to be a scientist to know this. A single example is an acceptable error. A mass of them needs explanation. At what point does fixing become fudging, even fraud? Who decides? This is a major scandal.

It’s not difficult to come up ideas about how some towns and areas may be cooling, when surrounding areas and towns might be warming, even within a more general regional or global warming. It is a pity that the BOM can’t think of any of these.

The head of one of the BOM’s climate units has stated that, he ‘knows’ that ‘all towns in Australia are experiencing warming, so they are identifying ‘spurious’ data and adjusting the dataset to show consistency etc etc’. This shows both a surprising and disturbing lack of understanding about both the climate, and climate data.

Reasons for local variations within a more regional warming/cooling trend, even in a warming world, include the following: changes in winds, rainfall, ocean currents, land use, and shifting climatic zones. There are probably also many others that escape the BOM’s notice:

Eg:
1. If rainfall patterns increase in a town or area, the area can cool over the longer term, and vice versa; during drought conditions towns tend to be warmer. This can also show up if there is a long term drying without the area even getting any ‘warmer’ (so to speak) at all, there is just more sunlight and less cloudy days.

2. Increase or decrease in wind patterns, such as tropical trade winds can effect temperatures, as well as rainfall which also effects temperatures.

Brisbane is a case in point, it shows cooling which might relate to either changes in subtropical wind patterns, changes in rainfall, changes in ocean currents, or even shifting subtropical latitudinal zones which influences all of these.

Some areas near/about mountainous areas are very sensitive to wind direction regimes, and these winds can shift regionally over time.

People are also looking at this in relation to Antarctic sea ice, it shows an increase which might relate to shifting wind patterns and/or ocean currents.

Another case is many parts of Greenland, which have been cooling since about the 1930s. Scientists don’t attempt to ‘homogenise’ this with areas of Europe or North America, because they know it is too large and significant, and must be real. These things can also occur in smaller, more localised areas.

3. If ocean currents change or increase/decline in strength it is obvious that nearby areas will undergo temperature changes. These can also be contrary to a more regional warming or cooling trend, as the currents come from some distance.

4. Paradoxically, if latitudinal zones shift south under warming (in the southern hemisphere), then an area could theoretically cool under increased rainfall and changes in both wind and humidity.

5. Land use and vegetation. This likely isn’t strong in regional Australia, but areas with large changes in vegetation and land use could show changes in temperatures, generally speaking less vegetation cover means warmer local temperatures. It does show up in reverses in urban areas with the urban heat island effect.

With all thee factors, how come the BOM is routinely adjusting station data to ‘homogenise’ with other areas, without acknowledging that local variations in temperature trends can, and do, occur in many parts of the world?

The effect of this, would be to give a regional trend which is higher than what is actually occurring.

A related important point relates to choice/inclusions of stations:

Say you have 2 relatively distant towns with a temperature say, of 35 degrees, the average over the area is 35 degrees. If you then later in the time series add a third nearby town, to increase station density, which shows 36 degrees, obviously the average temperature goes up, but note that this has occurred without any actual change in temperature, all that has been done is that a town has been added to the series at a later date which results in a warmer trend.

When I put this to someone who worked on regional data, their reply was that there is no reason why the later-added town couldn’t also result in a reduction in the average result or trend. True, but of course, what would happen if such a town’s data was already previously homogenised to begin with? Or not even chosen because it showed cooling, and wasn’t consistent with other town trends?

If you make enough adjustments, they tend to magnify against each other over time, it’s just surprising that people who work on this sort of thing often don’t see this. The BOM’s statements themselves above reveal a general and surprising lack of awareness about this.

Recalling the formal request to the Australian Auditor General to Audit BOM and CSIRO Climate Data and Advice back in February 2011, the facts revealed by Graham Lloyd’s articles and Dr Jennifer Marohasy’s research are not at all surprising. What is surprising is that the BOM has gotten away with this for so long and that more scientists haven’t had the inquisitiveness and courage shown by Dr Marohasy. Perhaps the reason is because anyone who dares to suggest the climate isn’t warming as predicted by the IPCC is denounced as a ‘climate denier’ by BOM, environmental activists, many politicians and the rent seekers who are profiting from the climate scare.

- BOM Data is vitally important to the nation
- There are currently no independent audits of climate data
- Unexplained adjustments and errors have been discovered
- Artificial adjustments exaggerate the warming

BOM changed to the current ACORN data series which is claimed by BOM to use peer reviewed world best practice but still they refuse to release their calculations for public scrutiny. However researchers such as Dr Marohasy and others have been highlighting major errors and problems, and the obvious ‘warming bias’ in the new ACORN data series since it’s release.

It is heartening that ‘The Australian’ and Graham Lloyd have broken this story because billions of dollars of taxpayer expenditure is being made based on the faulty data and projections provided by climate activists at BOM and the CSIRO. Australian scientist and politicians rely on that data unquestioningly.

Over $10 billion dollars worth of mothballed desalination plants stands as testament, and is just one example of poor decisions made by our politicians in reaction to faulty predictions from BOM.

E.G.It MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.

“Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.

Suggest you consult:
Independent Peer Review
of the ACORN-SAT Data-set
Sept 2011
“A. The Observation Practices Employed by the Bureau of Meteorology for Surface Air Temperature Measurements
The Panel finds that the Bureau’s observing practices for the ACORN-SAT network are above average
standard with respect to current international practice. Adherence to these observing practices enables determination of multi-decadal national climate trends from the ACORN-SAT observations once they have been quality control checked and homogenised. But there is room for some improvements.”

Out of the 112 ACORN-SAT stations, no less than 69 of them have at least one day in the record with a minimum temperature greater than the maximum temperature for the same day. In the entire dataset, there are 917 days where the min exceeds the max temperature

The point is, sillyfillyf, that they are sloppy. Also, with regard to you citing an endorsement, no one is claiming that Australia is an isolated case in business of pushing down previous temperature and pushing up the present. Quite the contrary. It is the very global unanimity of these fiddlers pushing down past temperatures and upping the present, that suggests from probability alone, that their adjustments are agenda driven and bottom-line predictable.

How is the ‘peer review’ independent when they would not have let a sceptical scientist (i.e. a proper scientist), anywhere near the review process. Did the whole Climategate thing and ‘pal review’ escape your notice Silly?

Besides, they are only talking about the ‘process’ not what BOM actually did. The PROCESS was peer reviewed as best practice. The reviewers made it clear that they didn’t actually check the data and how the process was applied by BOM. And of course BOM has refused to make their calculations public. If they are so confident of above average world’s best practice, why the reluctance?

The ‘process’ involves taking outlier data and ‘homogenising’ it with surrounding stations. This might work fine if the surrounding locations are relatively close and the positioning of the temperature gauges are similar in terms of environment, surroundings, nearby man made structures and activities and so on.

In that case it is reasonable to assume the ‘outlier’ data is wrong and needs to be homogenised. But that ‘process’ isn’t appropriate in Australia where in many cases the ‘nearby’ stations are the ones which have experienced a build up of man made structures and activities and therefore suffer from UHI warming and/or they are hundreds of kilometres away and therefore do not reflect the regional climate of the station being homogenised. Or did you miss that part of Dr Marohasy’s example with regards to the Amberley station in Queensland Silly?

Recording “observations” is one thing, further manipulation of the recorded data is an altogether different beast. If they can’t record data correctly, as is demonstrated by the various instances of daily low being greater than the daily high temperatures, then why should we have any confidence in the ability of the BoM to do anything right?

OK. So why don’t you email Case Smit. He’s good at organising these sorts of events… both the fundraising and promotion of the same. He may reply that Jo doesn’t have a high enough profile… he has muttered something along those lines to me. But the only way she is going to get a higher profile is if someone like Case gets behind her effort and promotes her, and her work.

If I’d made a mistake with the numbers the BOM would have told Graham Lloyd straight away.

They have not dispute the numbers for Amberley, Rutherglen, Bourke or any of the other places so far supplied.

They are now saying, wrt to Amberely that the dog ate the meta-data… in not so many words. That is, there must have been a site move they just can’t find any documentation and/or it could be classified.

Of course the weather station at Amberley is within the perimeter of Australia’s largest RAAF base in Australia.

BOM do not like using the data from 1910-1920, because it is usually somewhat above current temperatures.

It has therefore been “deleted”.

Yes, I recall the BoM determined data pre 1910 to be ‘unreliable’?

To quote Dr Dennis Jensen MP:

While this may be true, it is also true that the IPCC, in their reports, use global average data that goes back to 1850. We are asked to the believe that the IPCC, of which the BOM is a very active participant, is rigorous in their science, data and fact-checking. So the question is: how do we reconcile unreliable Australian data prior to 1910 with supposedly reliable global data going back to 1850?

I assume this BOM data is supplied overseas to groups like the very scrupulous IPCC. What is supplied, the raw data or the ‘summary’ data from the BOM?

Australia might be a small country in population, but we are a continent and the largest landmass in the bottom half of the planet, so we are very significant for world temperature, especially as the Southern Hemisphere is much colder than the northern. Antarctica is 20 degrees colder than the Arctic and even Melbourne is at the latitude of Libya.

We also have a reputation as an advanced country with real scientists. If this fudged (sorry, homogenized) data is being supplied as the source for half the planet (plus Antarctica), what impact has it had on the calculation of so called global temperature? You know, the one which is refusing to go up. If this data is wrong, then the ‘global’ world temperature, however it is calculated, may have gone down.

Australia has 7.7million sq km. Antarctica 14, South Africa 1.2, Chile 0.8 and Argentina 2.8. So apart from massive and frozen Antarctica, Australia is maybe 60% of the land mass south of the equator. If our numbers are dodgy, so it the world temperature and it is all down to our BOM. We are so significant, was there pressure put on the BOM to show warming? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink? Remember hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake in Big Warming money. Was this homogenization a solution to a scientific problem or a commercial one?

As stated, Antarctica is twice the size of Australia. I meant the largest warm land mass. I suspect that Antarctica’s very low temperatures at very low latitudes matter little to the ‘global’ temperature. Much depends on how anyone creates such a global temperature when averaging the tropics to the poles.

The data in the graphs starts in 1941 with the solid line. The trend lines are based on the data but fill the entire chart space. I’ve used a template with a 1910 start date, as I use the same template for all the ACORN versus CDO comparisons… as does Ken. Sorry for any confusion.

A snippet:
“8. CONSISTENCY BETWEEN ACORN-SAT AND OTHER
DATASETS
There is no a priori reason to accept or reject homogeneity adjustments that result in an
amplification or diminution of the diagnosed warming. There are, however, very well
established reasons to reject the use of raw or unadjusted data to characterise climate variability
and change. International studies have shown that the homogenised temperature changes are
more likely to reflect real physical changes over time than unadjusted data (e.g., most recently
Menne et al. 2010). Unadjusted data are known to, and in the case of Australian data certain to,
contain artificial discontinuities and spurious changes due to biases and errors in the raw data.
Hence attempts to construct Australian temperature records without the use of any form of
homogeneity adjustments are certain to contain non-physical temperature changes.”
and
“Minimum temperature differences show gradual changes, with the most noticeable shifts being
a decrease in the difference between the AWAP and ACORN analyses during the 1940s, and again during the 1990s. These two periods both saw substantial numbers of site moves from town-centre sites to out-of-town sites (mostly airports): indeed about two-thirds of all town-to-rural moves in the ACORN-SAT dataset occurred either between 1939 and 1952, or in the 1990s. As out-of-town sites tend, in the absence of other influences (such as topography or proximity to the coast), to have lower minimum temperatures than in-town sites, a systematic move from in-town to out-of-town locations, as occurred in the 1940s and 1990s, will tend to result in systematic negative discontinuities across these locations. This will be expressed as a transient, artificial cooling of large-scale averages of the unhomogenised minimum temperature data.”

If modern data sets were homoginised to conform to historical data standard any generated trend will be valid – in fact it would be a more accurate trend as the majority of the data would be unhomogenised.

Unadjusted data are known to, and in the case of Australian data certain to,
contain artificial discontinuities and spurious changes due to biases and errors in the raw data.

That just shows there are errors and uncertainties. Artificially erasing them does not increase the certainty. That is especially so if the there is a you-can-bet-on-it overall industrial pattern of the adjustments turning non-warming and even cooling, into warming.

“Unadjusted data are known to, and in the case of Australian data certain to, contain artificial discontinuities and spurious changes due to biases and errors in the raw data.”

This is absurd waffle, every bit of it. An artificial discontinuity? A discontinuity has a reason but it only happens once, it could be real and does not invalidate data! The data is always correct unless there is a known instrument or recording failure but the local environment might have changed as happens. So what? Who said it had to be continuous and smooth? This sounds like a set of extremely vague science sounding Yes Minister excuses for adjusting everything with an underlying strong statement that Australian data was particularly prone to being wrong and therefore far more in need of fudging than normal. We are talking about regular measurements of temperature? How hard can that be? How wrong can it be? Is there a simpler measurement in science?

To change a steady temperature drop into a steady rise is no discontinuity. I suppose that is classified as one of those strong bias situations which has been completely reversed, scientifically. These excuses are nonsense science.

Besides, once again, what did the original unadjusted analysis show? That Australia was cooling?

Sillyfilly, these are just words to distract you from what BOM did with Amberley.

Here is what BOM say officially about the Amberley site history:

The site has been operating since August 1941. No significant moves are evident in documentation but the data indicate a substantial change of some kind at the site in or around 1980. An automatic weather station was installed on 3 July 1997. Manual observations continued under site number 040910 until September 1998.

So there has been NO site movements, so no justification for adjustments based on going from in-town to out of town.

What they did note is a “change of some kind” in 1980. When you look at the raw data, average minimum temperatures declined between 1980 and 1982 in Amberley by about 2.0C. That didn’t suit them, so without identifying any non natural cause for the decline, they ‘adjusted the two years to an increase of about 1.5C in one year and a decline of just under 2.0C the next year to make the drop over the two years about 0.2C or 0.3C instead of a fall of the recorded decline of 2.0C.

It didn’t matter that the raw data showed similar rises and falls of the average minimum in the early 1950′s, mid 1950′s and early to mid 1970′s, they weren’t considered a “change of some kind” which needed to be addressed..

But the BOM didn’t stop their fiddling at the 1980-1982 data. They dropped the average minimum temperature starting in 1941 by almost 2.0C so that there is now a manufactured warming of the temperature from the start date to the adjusted 1980′s data, which they continued after that date. As you can see by referencing the raw versus adjusted data here: http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/australia/amberley-adjustments.jpg

There is absolutely no justification given for the dramatic changes they carried out at the Amberley station.

With regards to homogenisation to agree more closely with nearby sites, unless those sites are only a couple of kilometres apart, and the surroundings are comparable, is there some justification for homogenising.

With regards the global warming impact the UN IPCC worry about, it is only post 1950 movement of stations we need to be most concerned about. It is possible that a site which moves from in-town to out-of-town, will experience a change in temperature records if there was an influencing UHI. To determine the amount of the adjustment required you really need to run both stations for a couple of years to allow two data points in each season, otherwise you don’y have very good source data to estimate the appropriate adjustment.

None of this is rocket science, If the BOM have legitimate reasons for changing the raw data, they should be prepared to open their work to scrutiny.

Conclusions
1. Homogenization is necessary to remove errors introduced in climatic time
series.

2. Homogenization practices used until today are mainly statistical, not well
justified by experiments and are rarely supported by metadata. It can be
argued that they often lead to false results: natural features of hydroclimatic
time series are regarded errors and are adjusted.

3. While homogenization is expected to increase or decrease the existing
multiyear trends in equal proportions, the fact is that in 2/3 of the cases the
trends increased after homogenization.

4. The above results cast some doubts in the use of homogenization procedures
and tend to indicate that the global temperature increase during the
last century is smaller than 0.7-0.8°C.

5. A new approach of the homogenization procedure is needed, based on
experiments, metadata and better comprehension of the stochastic
characteristics of hydroclimatic time series.

Site moves e.g. post office to airport, will of course result (frequently) in lower minima. The two records should be and mostly are separate and different records. Where there is sufficient overlap (at least 24 months)they may be spliced or combined to create a long term record, so some adjustment is usually made to the earlier data. That is what I have done, and my adjustment matches the Acorn adjustment almost exactly (less than 0.1C difference) in all but 2 or 3 cases where Acorn makes adjustments not related to the comparison. The point of these posts remains: After making these overlap adjustments, the comparison shows Acorn produces 66.6% more warming across the network than the raw, spliced records. That’s in 83 of 104 sites. The remaining sites do not have sufficient (or any) overlapping data to make the splicing adjustments.

The over-riding principle, according to the seminal scientific papers on this subject right back to a paper by James Hansen and colleagues published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2001, is that homogenization should only be to correct for non-climatic factors.

The general principle is that two criteria should BOTH be meet:

1. There is a statistically significant discontinuity in the temperature series (i.e. the algorithm comes up with a query), and

2. There is meta-data that supports the discontinuity (i.e. it is noted in the catalogue that there was a site move at that same time).

While this is what the theory clear says, this ‘policy’ is no longer followed by any of the leading institutions. In the US, UK and Australia, in particular, the government institutions responsible for the temp data sets just appear to do whatever they want and document this in technical reports.

Thank you Jo, I read the articles in the Australian today, which, I am ashamed to say, thrilled my sceptical and cynical self, so I thought that I should check Jo Nova in case I had misinterpreted the articles. I just wish that I could adjust the figures of the Rugby Test in NZ tonight.

Old news folks – here in New Zealand, a decade or two ago, we have had the same shameful practice carried out by NIWA / Jim Salinger on NZ’s historical climate data.
Result, decades prior to 1970′s “cooled” so that it could show modern “warming”.

Salinger learnt his trade / manipulation skills, at the University of East Anglia.

This statement is not correct:
“At Burke(sic), in western NSW, BoM deleted the first 40 years of data because temperatures before 1908 were apparently not recorded in a Stevenson screen, the agreed modern method.

Marohasy says this could have been easily accounted for with an accepted algorithm, which would not have changed the fact that it was obviously much hotter in the early 20th century than for any period since. Instead, the early record is deleted, and the post-1910 data homogenised.”

Bourke data pre 1910 is on the closed site for Bourke PO, unhomogenised

But to find the PO data, at some stage in the process, you will need to ‘un-tick’ the box that limits the search to ‘open stations’. If you persist you will hopefully eventually get to the final step, and hopefully the data falls into your download box.

2. I’ve visited the National Archives at Chester Hill in Western Sydney and been through the boxes of original data dating back to 1871.

My apologies, I only wished to point out that the data is available unadjusted, as we both know from our visits to the BOM. Of course, you were referencing ACORN data(which I missed). As the Dodo stated earlier, doh!!!

I’ve been looking at unadjusted data from Ipswich and Amberley, they have coverage overlap and are the closest of neighbours at 6ks, though there is discontinuity in the Ipswich record. The graphs are of annual minimum temperatures, here are the BOM references:

Notice the symmetry during the 1940′s and 1950′s then the dramatic disconnect in the latter part of the record. Also notice the difference in absolute values which are proportionally large. This shows that either Amberley is correct and Ipswich had anomalous warming or Ipswich is correct and Amberley had anomalous cooling.
The ACORN record would agree with Ipswich at first pass.

I’d appreciate your thoughts, as you’ve spent a lot more time on it than I have.

Being only 6km apart, normal BOM practice would be to combine the Ipswich and Amberley records to produce a long continuous record. They don’t do this, probably because the Ipswich data is not reliable, being a large city with evident UHI. Brisbane Aero 50km away is used by Acorn- a combination of the old and new airports, several km apart- and Brisbane’s raw data shows another cooling trend. Perhaps there was a real local cooling? Anyway, after homogenising and warming both Amberley and Brisbane, Amberley’s warming trend is greater than the adjusted trend at Brisbane (and Bundaberg, Gayndah, Miles, Cape Moreton, and Yamba- the other neighbouring Acorn sites). There is evidence for something happening around 1980, but the adjustment cure was worse than the disease.

From the BOM on Brisbane Aero:
“History
The original site (040223) was in the southwest corner of the old (Eagle Farm)
airport, near the Eagle Farm railway station. It moved about 800 m north in
August 1955 to a location on the western side of the old airport, near where
the Gateway Motorway now is. An automatic weather station was installed
at the southern end of the main runway of the new airport on 30 November
1987, about 3 km east of the previous location. The automatic weather station
became the primary instrument on 1 November 1996. The site closed in
February 2000.
The current site (040842) was established in April 1994, 3.3 km to the
northeast of the previous site (040223).”

So your raw unadjusted data may not be realistic because of possible non-climatic factors. While your efforts are commendable, there is plenty of information to question your assertions.

Brisbane Aero now has a warming trend in Acorn. Amberley’s Acorn trend is greater than Brisbane’s Acorn trend- and all other surrounding Acorn sites. Perhaps, just maybe, the adjustments at Amberley were too much? (And similarly at Dubbo, Rutherglen, Rabbit Flat, and Carnarvon. Conversely, the cooling adjustments at Tarcoola create a trend smaller than the surrounding Acorn sites.)

[...] trends. There is both a feature and a news piece today in The Weekend Australian. – Jo Nova The heat is on. Bureau of Meteorology ‘altering climate figures’ — The Australian Rate this:Share this:GoogleTwitterFacebookStumbleUponRedditEmailLike this:Like [...]

I was hesitant to say anything on this one. There’s nothing new about doctoring up the data. And a lot of people have been pointing it out for years. Chris Monkton pointed it out to a congressional committee but he might as well have read to them from the Kama Sutra — it would have generated more interest. But at least The Australian deserves a word of recognition for pointing it out in a mainstream publication. Way to go!

I wonder if it’s because they realize the public is already paying attention to such things rather than because it’s the right thing to do.

The post ran to 2044 comments.
About 500 of those comments were probably germane to the actual subject. The rest are a whole compendium of back biting, snark and etc, mostly but not all from the warmists that also inhabit Judy’s blog.

Certainly Zeke Hausfather’s post is worth a read as is the sequence of the NCDC’s adjustments are mind boggling but do nothing for the ultimate public clarity and ultimate percieved honesty of the weather and climate data as a public presentation and truly representative of the past weather and climate as we, the public know and recognise it..

I have read the first thousand comments at the time and have since scanned the remainder.
Finding or returning to some interesting or relevant comment on Judy’s blog is damn difficult as she uses comment nesting but unlike Jo’s blog which is easily followed and comments easily returned to and located through the use of a numbering system and those often amusing and seemingly often very relevant to the individuals output and mentality the various poster’s icons [ which I use all the time to scan quickly for posts from individual posters ] for nested comments, thats if you can remember the numbers!

The post and comments in the “Adjustment” post dealt with the adjustments made by the “National Climate Data Center” [ NCDC ] which is the central depository for all US weather / climate data from where after the NCDC has done it’s damnedest in the way of adjustments, some of a necessity and some for nobody seems to know quite for what very [ deliberately ] opaque reasons and some which nobody seems to be sure of as to how, when, why and if those adjustments are made, the data is then passed on down the line for GISS and CRU to be further proffessionaly butchered in a warmist science fashion before it is released to the public as a supposedly scientifically approved version of the weather records and climate research outcomes.

We think Australia is very bad which it is, in it’s adjustments to the temperature records but the problem is world wide as all the weather / climate researchers and data centers usually all run by alarmist who have organised their own alarmist mafia to fill all authorative positions in climate research
Rather than re-invent the wheel they all use roughly the same algorithms to adjust, infill, krige, zombie, adjust and generally **** [ self snipped ] up weather records giving the usual mpression that it is all done to fulfill their own particular ideological aims.

Although it is mostly likely a case for a lot of the personnel doing this of “never attribute to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence”.

I just lifted a couple of comments from this NCDC adjustment post of “Climate Etc’s”. one of which gives some idea of the lay person’s perceptions of what is a “sensible perception of reality and truthfulness” versus the climate alarmist science version of “reality” is the following case as quoted from the comments.

__________

BEST; is the Berkeley Earth climate project another of the steadily proliferating climate projects ]

Comment by Rud Istvan

“For a closer to home example, BEST station 166900 was changed from basically no trend raw to modest ‘expected’ warming.
Your only reply has been to distinguish actuals from BEST ‘expectations’ and not explain why 26 months of cold extremes were rejected by your BEST algorithm (according the the BEST own information) because they did not agree with your modeled ‘regional expectation’.
To repeat again, 166900 is the US Amundsen- Scott research station established in 1957.
The most expensive, scientifically important station in the world.
Your algorithm rejected 26 months of its reported temps because they did not agree with your model ‘expectation’. Words are off your website.
Now, the nearest equivalent Antarctic station to compare is US McMurdo, roughly 1300 km away and roughly 2700 meters lower along the Antarctic coastline where it can be resupplied by icebreaking ships.”

___________________

And this comment

“I would have no problem if the public were told that “we estimate that the country’s average of interpolated, estimated, krigged, infilled anomalies is increasing by one tenth of a degree per decade,” because then it would be clear that there is a lot more than measurement of temperature going on.

And the argument would properly be over the validity of the various assumptions, corrections and estimations. Just as is occurring in this thread”.

_______________
Finally and most relevant and generously paraphrasing Winston Churchill

“‘never in the field of human endeavour has so much been spent by so many for so little result…”

You raised your concerns with Greg Hunt repeatedly. Did it make any dent in his faith? I think you might do better to issue your concerns to all the Conservative MPs, excluding Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull.

Sorry, saying BOM did this or that won’t cut it. Need names otherwise it appears to be a wild conspiracy theory and we don’t need that!

I’m sorry too, sorry to disagree. We don’t need names to show what has been done. We only need the numbers to demonstrate the manipulation of data – for anyone interested in looking and who can get the gist. I’ll go so far as to say that names, other than ‘BoM’ are immaterial to the point. One doesn’t need the names of a manufacturer’s workers to stop buying a product when its found to be faulty.

Seriously, I don’t understand where you are coming from. Does anyone else here think we need names?

You said, that this issue will be dealt with in the wash. Other than the sceptical agitation (like from us), what wash?

As for your first bit, I’ll let it go, except to say that it there is no point talking to MPs you already know (or strongly suspect) to have their faithful fingers planted in their ears.

If you don’t single out the perpetrators of the fraud and instead accuse all of BOM, you are also accusing good people in the organisation that had absolutely no connection.

Same goes for the CSIRO and no MP will accept the notion, let alone put their support to an investigation.

“The wash” is when this global warming rubbish is totally falsified, the ensuing legal actions against the NAMES to ensure that the perpetuation of the scam in another form is restricted.

I’m struggling to find a connection of a private manufacturer and an Australian Government organisation.

Concerning your last point…I wouldn’t waste my time or my policy capital talking to any MP on this issue. Would lose all credibility.

Also, I laugh at the condemnation of Greg Hunt here, if was not for Abbott’s (sceptic) most trusted ally (alleged warmist) we would still have a carbon tax and there is more to come. But I suppose the sceptics played their part without knowing such…lol. How does it feel to be used just like the warmists to achieve an objective?

I’m done in the fight but it was a most interesting journey though. Not sure what was the highlight. A toss up between taking on a government on the highest CO2 per capita or the scalp of Flannery. Most satisfying.

After the 18c matter, the development of the north then I’ll simply fade away. Yep.

The BoM issues the adjusted data and therefore the BoM is responsible for it, especially if they are still defending and thereby further endorsing it – which they are. Surely that’s basic. Frankly, I think the red herring about first needing to the names is very strange, as if the manipulated data hasn’t otherwise happened and as if Dr. Marohasy actually has no evidence of fudging. Look, it’s simple; the raw data is available; the BoM modified data is available. The two can be compared and the anomalies noted without the identification of Fred Nurks.

“The wash” is when this global warming rubbish is totally falsified,

No, the ‘wash’ is the falsification and the coming clean or forcing clean. You, sir, have put the falsification ahead of the submission of facts, when clearly it operates the other way around. Otherwise we are wasting our time here. Are we?

I’m struggling to find a connection of a private manufacturer and an Australian Government organisation.

Then let’s try again:

It is reasonable to reject the buying of a manufactured item that you have learned to be faulty.

It is reasonable to reject the buying of manufactured data that you have learned to be faulty.

Does that juxtaposition make the analogy easier?

Also, I laugh at the condemnation of Greg Hunt here, if was not for Abbott’s (sceptic) most trusted ally (alleged warmist) we would still have a carbon tax and there is more to come.

I don’t think you were laughing; I think you were seething. On the Bolt Report, Andrew referred to Hunt as being a warmist (twice) and he didn’t deny it. From the transcript:

ANDREW BOLT:
I got that, but I’m just asking specifically the question. You’re the warmist, I’m not. Won’t this, by your own calculations, mean hot days get hotter?

GREG HUNT:
No, because what it’s about is the world and you and I obviously disagree on the, on the principle under this, but –

There is also the way he is ignoring Dr. Marohasy’s glaring evidence. So is he a warmist or is he a faker? The label, ‘alleged warmist’ has no business here when he won’t dispute it. I also reject that I condemned Greg Hunt. I just think he is of the faith and not interested in evidence against AGW.

But I suppose the sceptics played their part without knowing such…lol. How does it feel to be used just like the warmists to achieve an objective?

So, please, what would you like us to do, Scaper? [/sarc]. I thought it was the warmists’ job to insult the sceptics in this blog.

I’m done in the fight but it was a most interesting journey though.

Well it looks like you’ll be leaving on a sour note. It’s fine that you now have other battles to fight and it’s fine that you wish to retire from this one. But don’t discourage others from continuing with this one and don’t make out that all that is needed is for them to wait for the magic ‘wash’.

Thanks Griss. It has taken its toll. I had a thriving business but let it slide due to concentrating on this issue.

I’ve also done this by self funding to ensure my independence. I’m now basically broke, a few months ago, after my life lost her job I could not even scrape up enough to pay my IPA membership.

Sean has a fine collection of autographed books given by me over this period, except the latest Ian Plimer book because we were too broke to buy one.

No problem though, I plan to be flush again by Xmas as my family has not had a holiday for three years and we are in need of one.

Sean and I disagree on the BOM issue. I hold my position that if one attempts to smear all of the people in BOM instead of discovering the perpetrators of this fraud one will be labelled a “nutter” by the politicians.

So go ahead, Sean, ignore my advice. I’ve been in the game for over seven years and have a different perspective than someone that cheers and jeers from the sideline.

Sean has a fine collection of autographed books given by me over this period, except the latest Ian Plimer book because we were too broke to buy one.

I recall being told that you are given them and that you don’t have the time for reading. Had I known you were paying for them, thus causing you financial difficulty, I would have declined. I never asked for them and now wish to pay for them. Can you please come up with a figure? If not, I will. By the way, thanks for raising this in a popular blog. Nice form.

Sean once asked when will I decide to be a capitalist? Never and am not a socialist either. Don’t ascribe to the black or white view of the world.

I asked what? Not only don’t I recall anything like that, it is not something that would interest me and I would consider such a question to be boorish.

Sean and I disagree on the BOM issue. I hold my position that if one attempts to smear all of the people in BOM instead of discovering the perpetrators of this fraud one will be labelled a “nutter” by the politicians.

So why not have a go at Jo, Jennifer and Anthony Watts, who are clearly more concerned with the BoM’s data than in determining who directly produced it? As far as my attempting to smear all of the BoM, that is something out of your head rather than my goal. My issue is with the CAGW rubbish, not on whether they can predict a storm next weekend. That said, the BoM has been a significant player in the global warming hysteria, as has the CSIRO.

I believe that it reasonable to present the hard evidence of creative figures coming (undeniably) from the BoM. If your politicians think that not supplying names as well makes one “a nutter”, then that would make them too dim to bother with. Forgive me for assuming that they aren’t that dim. Perhaps you know differently.

So go ahead, Sean, ignore my advice. I’ve been in the game for over seven years and have a different perspective than someone that cheers and jeers from the sideline.

You need to learn the difference between sneering/hectoring and cautious ‘advice’. I guess you must talk to politicians differently.

I forwarded a copy of Stewart & Nova, “Australian BOM “neutral” adjustments increase minima trends up 60%” and Marohasy, “Cooling Temperature Trend Establishing Across Northeastern Australia” to Ewen Jones, and they got forwarded to – Greg Hunt
On the other hand, there may be an electronic equivalent of the old “if the file gets fat enough, they’ll notice it.”

Following up on a claim from the BoM that Climate Change will lead to more hotter days I began at Sydney Obs.
Using the raw CDO, I found that there were almost 20% +35C days between 1921-1950 for Sydney Observatory than for 1981-2010 (112 to 92).
Thought I would check the 1926 data (as there were 10 days over 35C that year) with ACORN and stopped at January when I realised the disparity between the two records.
ACORN reduced the monthly mean for that month from 26.2C to 25.2C – a full 1.0C (average mean for Jan is 25.9C).
So I checked the only other station around Sydney open at the time (Richmond RAAF) to see if Sydney Obs was an outlier and adjusted down accordingly.
Richmond’s 1926 max mean was 30.4C – a full degree above its average. So the adjustments don’t come from a nearby station.
What is going on here?

The term “Climate Change” is actually an abbreviation of, “Climate Records Change”.

Post-normal science approaches time, as a philosophical question. Consequently, it does not distinguish between past, present, and future. So if the present does not align with the projected future, then the past must be “adjusted” so that it does.

If Climate Scientists did not constantly monitor and adjust current temperatures, we would have anarchy. And nobody wants that, do they?

If our side can make this accusation “stick” at just one country’s BOM, it will lead to a reexamination of another . . . and another. If all or most are faulty / biased, it would be a spoke in the wheels of the alarmist bandwagon.

I just get confused by these numbers. If all the BOM are doing is getting rid of rogue numbers, why do the old numbers go down and the new numbers go up? Surely it would go both ways, in which case there wouldn’t be any real change to the trends? But, on the other hand, if it was being manipulated to arrive at a predetermined conclusion….

Surely this is a Police matter? All records from BOM should be seized by FEderal POlice for impending investigation and possible trial of guilty partiesinside BOM. It is in a fact a criminal case or definitely should be.

In my hometown of Mareeba FNQ the difference in temperature betweenthe airport, were the temp gauges are located the centre of town and Bibhoora are exeptional! Within 10 km you can have a difference of 5-9 degrees!! Mareeba is as flat as z billiard table, the gauges are installed in the warmest part of Mareeba not the median point. Will that skew the results…..

Rain data at Wangaratta was left out as we had “an equipment failure” But reliable alternativce sources were no used to correct the 30 Mils which were missing.
Contacting the local paper, they found they had published this fact and 30 mills was never entered allwoing them to write” The rainfall for the period this year has been similar to 2009. When with the corrected figures, the rainfall would have been similar to 1960′s. There are shares in environmental projects involved, with unions havign Superannuation invested in these . Imagine the losses if these projects are scrapped? No wonder they are up in arms….

[...] “At Rutherglen, Victoria, a cooling trend of -0.35 degrees C per century was magically transformed at the stroke of an Australian meteorologist’s pen into a warming trend of 1.73 degrees C per century. [...]

[...] is on over weather bureau and Bureau of Meteorology ‘altering climate figures, which I covered here. This is the power of the press at its best. The absence of articles like these, is why I have said [...]